Hamster Herding
by kirakoff
Summary: There were times when Kaidan marveled over the fact that he had married John Shepard, and his Hamster Herding ways. .Mshep/Kaidan..crack.


**Disclaimer:** Mass Effect belongs to BioWare.  
**Warnings:** Crackiness, mentions of Shepard and Kaidan being kinky mofos, stuffed hamsters in strange places.  
**Author's Notes: **Because I adore space hamster, and I sort of imagine that he's Shepard's little buddy to talk to when shit gets rough for him.

* * *

The problem with living with a man who bred space hamsters for a living, was, well, that Kaidan was living with a man who bred space hamsters. In Vancouver. For a living. Personally Kaidan figured that made them normal hamsters, but Shepard was always quick to correct him. Shepard and his veritable army of hamsters. There were days, usually after a particularly long one of feeding rodents, cleaning out their cages and assuring everyone that John wasn't crazy, that Kaidan found himself wondering if maybe his husband would be happier if he was back in space, shooting down mercenaries and defending the innocent. The whole Hamster Herding thing had started after Shepard had retired, after all.

Retirement. Kaidan used to dream of warm beaches, exotic women and sleeping in a bed big enough to fit two men comfortably without their feet hanging off the edge – instead he ended up in a warm house, with an exotic daughter, and a bed big enough to fit two grown men and their adopted Quarian child without their feet hanging off the edge. And a garage full of hamsters.

Jane had loved the hamsters when she'd been a kid, running up and down the hallways with a good four or five stuffed into a basket while claiming she was their mother, but the love had waned after one had gotten into her spare envirosuit and chewed it's way out of the left leg. After that there had been a general rule of No Hamsters in the House, because envirosuits were expensive to make, even more expensive to repair, and buying their baby girl a new one had meant that they'd had to go two months without extranet connection – by then, even Shepard had been a little bit resentful of the things. Then of course Boo XXXIX (the thirty-ninth) had died, and that had been a good two weeks of Shepard playing the blame game with himself. Once he'd felt better he'd then gone and gotten the thing taxidermied and it had gone to live on the shelf with it's predecessors, who dated all the way back to Boo I, Shepard's original space hamster. The one he'd had with him when he saved the galaxy. Boo I was looking a bit worse for wear these days, what with Kaidan's multiple attempts to get rid of it through the years, but now the tiny stuffed monstrosity enjoyed a privileged position atop the bookshelf in Shepard's study.

Kaidan always made him turn it around and put it under an old hat when they were having sex in that room, though. Sure, they'd had some pretty kinky sex when they were younger and coming off that We-Saved-the-Galaxy high, but just because he'd watched James Vega watch Shepard watch Steve Cortez watch him suck Shepard off while the other man had gone to down on his nipples and the couple next to them go to market on each other's cocks didn't mean he was going to let a dead hamster watch him go to the city on Shepard's ass.

At all.

It wasn't just the study that had hamster corpses hanging around, though. Over the years they'd started to decorate the living room, the kitchen and even their bathroom, and when Jane had started dating, John had lined them up on the windowsills next to the door just to creep out any of their daughter's potential suitors.

There were times when Kaidan had to marvel over the fact that Jane had even ended up with a life partner, with the infamous John Shepard and his Hamster Herding ways as her father.

There were also times when Kaidan marveled over the fact that he had married John Shepard, and his Hamster Herding ways. Granted, back then Shepard had still been working for the Alliance, and had only had one hamster with him (newly purchased Boo III) and hadn't shown any signs of rampant hamster obsession, so Kaidan figured he could be excused for it. It wasn't like John had gotten down on one knee, popped open a dead rodent's mouth with a ring in it and asked him to marry him. At least not yet. Kaidan was sure there would be problems when they finally let their hair go completely gray (or completely bald, in Shepard's case) with hamsters and senility, but that was a good decade off. Plenty of time for Jane to decide which home to send them to – which innocent other old people to terrorize with stories about the Reapers and the legendary drinking prowess of Garrus Vakarian.

(And what would happen if you got the old crew back together for John's fiftieth birthday shingdig and played drunken truth or dare with people who had seen and done so many different things there wasn't much that freaked them out much any more. Not even Wrex in Jane's old dress up tutu.)

Lord, poor Jane, the mess of stuffed rodents she'd have to clean up when her fathers died. John had mentioned them being buried with them once, but the look Kaidan had shot him had been so poisonous he'd actually foamed at the mouth a little. Kaidan may have had resigned himself to living with them, but there was no way on Earth, Tuchanka or Thessia he was going to be buried with them. His afterlife was going to be hamster-free, thank you.

And he'd probably be a good thirty years younger, too, so he'd be limber enough to get into positions he'd not gotten into for ages. The days of having sex squashed up against the dining room window were long gone, much like Mrs. Henderson, the old lady who had often caught a glimpse of Kaidan in said position from her backyard.

Never let it be said that Kaidan was going to embrace his golden years without looking back into his relatively hamster-free past. It was a beautiful thing to remember, the room in the garage for the cars, the boat, the motorbike and the home gym – as well the ability to do his work outs without feeling a dozen of little eyes watching him.

Now the garage resembled a hamster utopia, with Shepard's throne at the center of it all, where he spent four hours a day putting together little hamster sized model ships. Sure, Kaidan had never seen John put a hamster in one, but he wouldn't have put it past him. John would be the first person to fly a lone hamster to Omega and back via remote controlled spaceship. He was just that sort of guy.

He was also the sort of guy who would sit by the side of a pregnant hamster while she gave birth to her litter, squeezing Kaidan's hand as he explained where he'd gotten them from, how this hamster's mother had been bought on the Citadel when they'd gone on that family holiday with Jane a year ago, and how he was gonna name one of the babies after Jenkins, and then tell Kaidan that he'd spoken to Rory-across-the-street's mother, and would give Jenkins Jr to the ten year old, as well as a decent cage and equipment, because the kid's goldfish had just died and he needed a new friend.

He was the kind of guy who bred hamsters for a living in a warm little house in Vancouver with his husband, but hadn't actually sold one. He was the sort of guy who tended to give them to the small children who caught sight of them, all the while telling them toned down stories of his adventures on the Normandy, of his adventures in outer space, and how hamsters were considered exotic by the other species of aliens.

So while Kaidan missed his hamster-free youth, he had to admit that being married to a hamster herder wasn't all that bad, now that Shepard stopped bringing them into the house, as well as Spectre functions in his coat pockets. John never had more than twelve or thirteen at a time, anyways, and having the kids on the block coo at the them with John while Kaidan clipped the hedges and talked to their parents made him miss his baby girl just a little bit less after she left home. It wasn't how he'd envisioned his life, using his biotics to pull a stuck hamster from a pipe under their car when it jumped from a child's fingers, but it was a good one. Being a co-Hamster Herder had it perks, after all. The overly religious hanar that lived nearby didn't knock on their door, in any case.

Kaidan figured being stared at by dead hamsters _he'd_ positioned on the windowsill helped scare them off.


End file.
